Confused at Harvard

From a Times article about the return to the Harvard campus of students who had been forced to withdraw after being accused of cheating on a take-home final exam in a government class:

In late August 2012, Harvard administrators revealed that nearly half the students in a large class — identified by students as Government 1310, Introduction to Congress, with 279 students — were suspected of having cheated on a take-home final exam in May. Later, administrators said that more than half of those suspected, about 70 students, had been required to withdraw, generally for a year, retroactive to last September.
For many of those students, the start of the academic year last week meant returning to a campus that spent much of the past year debating what they did and how the university responded. Harvard, which has never said how many students were required to withdraw, also declined to say how many had re-enrolled.

Seventy is not "more than half" of 279. And doesn't the sentence that says "administrators said that more than half of those suspected, about 70 students, had been required to withdraw, generally for a year" contradict the sentence that says, "Harvard, which has never said how many students were required to withdraw"?

This isn't an issue of ideological bias, just of basic intelligibility, communication, and perhaps, math.